Trends on Tuesday: Top Five Trends in Mobile App Design for 2015

Feb 17, 2015
Tablet pc media concept

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Mobile user habits are a moving target, and designers have to adjust accordingly. Creative Bloq offers their Top 5 Trends in App Design for 2015 gathered from trends in changing hardware, increasing popularity of apps and the increasingly personal nature of mobile devices.

  1. Bigger Screen Sizes. As we noted in last week’s Trends on Tuesday post, the smartphone sales increase in 2014 was partially due to the growing numbers of “phablet-sized” smartphones. The growing percentage of larger screened smartphones is changing how people hold their phones, similar to tablets. As a result, there may be a merging of design for smartphone and tablet.

  2. Return to Skeuomorphism? Not quite—while the flat design styles of the past couple of years are not going away, they are being given some depth and movement to help provide context to users.

  3. Hidden Menus. Screen sizes may be increasing, but real estate on a smartphone is still at a premium. Contextual menus that appear when you need them—“navigation drawers”—are the result of gestural conventions that are now common among smartphone users.

City app on tablet

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  1. Apps with a Personality. Your smartphone is your almost constant companion—admit it, you get a real chuckle when Siri responds to one of your requests with a joke. This conversational style is everywhere, and many designers are including that in their apps.

  2. Increased Connectivity. Apps are becoming more connected with the increased use of GPS and Bluetooth. Add in the increased use of fitness bands and smartwatches, and your phone can gather all sorts of data about you. Apps can take advantage of all of this data to provide you with tailored suggestions for where to eat, what to do and what to buy. Designers will have more types of content and data to leverage when creating the user experience.

These five app design trends are important for federal agencies: Good design means good customer service and allows us to deliver anytime, anywhere services and information. It also helps prepare us for Internet of Things implementations.

Join us for Thursday’s MobileGov Around the Horn Call to talk about ways to include these trends in your agency’s mobile strategy.

Originally posted by Jacob Parcell on Feb 17, 2015

GSA | Washington D.C.

Feb 17, 2015